One More Cup of Coffee

Jen Kehl at My Skewed View and Kristi at Finding Nineehost Twisted MixTape Tuesday, a blog hop that’s all about music. The premise is to create a five song mix based on the week’s theme. (You can click on the button above if you’d like to play along). Here’s Jen’s instructions for today’s topic:

Great Cover Songs

I know I haven’t joined in for a couple weeks, but my winter blahs are reaching critical mass. I knew for a fact that I couldn’t miss this week though. I mean “cover songs” are my thing!

1. Ain’t No Sunshine – Santana and Rob Thomas. I just discovered this version of Bill Withers’ hit song a couple weeks ago. These two make a dynamite duo and I hope they do more collaborations in the future. I just wish there was a better version online.

2. One More Cup of Coffee – The White Stripes. You really can’t throw a rock into a pool of covers and not hit a Bob Dylan song. Dylan once remarked that this song was written from his experience of a week spent at a Gypsy Festival in France. I think Jack White does an admirable job in capturing the Dylan-esqueness (yeah I may have just made up that word) of the song.

3. I Will Always Love You – Chris Cornell. Honesty time here…I really dislike this song. Both Dolly’s version and Whitney’s. But I ran across this version about a month ago on a playlist and was really getting into it before I even realized what the song was. Are his vocals as pure as the more famous singers? Of course not…and that’s probably why I actually like this “rawer” version of the song. As far as I can by YouTube, the only performance he’s done that was recorded was for an Obama fundraiser a couple years ago.

4. Street Fighting Man – Oasis. Speaking of “raw” songs, I’m usually not a huge Oasis fan, but love this cover of the Rolling Stones’ song.

5. The Man Who Sold the World – Nirvana. I did a TMT post a few months back aboutcovers that were better than the originalsand included Nirvana’s cover of Where Did You Sleep Last Night. I had a discussion a few days later with a friend that asked me why I chose to use that Nirvana song from the MTV Unplugged special instead of this one. My answer was simple…its because I love both Nirvana’s cover and David Bowie’s original of this song and I really don’t think one version is better than the other.

FYI your blog is acting mean and wouldn’t go directly to your post until right now (I started trying last night) so although I read the post I couldn’t comment!
ANYWHOOOO! Loved the Santana/Rob Thomas!! I saw Santana two summers ago, it was AMAZING.
I am really wondering what even made Chris Cornell cover that song…. I guess he saw something in it that none of us did. And he really made it his own.
Great mix… love these.

I once did a “Got It Covered” post on a bunch of versions of “Ain’t No Sunshine.” I found a cover by Lenny Kravitz once and then it was gone. There is one vid that is listed as him, but apparently it’s not. The version I heard was just incredible. Very cool list.